Thanks so much for doing this. I just recently switched to my priest - all of your posts are helping quite a bit.

I'm running with a subtlety rogue right now in 2s... tonight we ran into a priest / mm hunter team, and they beat us twice... but both games were really close.

Our strat was pretty simple. The first match: rogue stayed on hunter while I mana burned priest. The only trouble is, the hunter had a crocolisk that kept me almost permanently hamstrung, so I really couldn't "catch" his priest. (I don't have 4 set bonus yet.) The hunter was also scatter trapping, snake trapping, and frost trapping every pillar i tried to hump... it was really obnoxious.

The priest would stand on one side of arena, and hunter stayed in the middle. If I tried to cross the arena to get to the priest, the hunter punished me, so I had to wait for them to screw up to make the run.

Eventually, I got the priest completely stripped of mana and buffs, and my rogue went in for a kill, while I assisted with DPS. I feared the hunter to stop peels... but sadly, we didn't get the kill (ugh) and I went OOM in the process. After that, I was an easy kill for them, and we lost.

The second match with them went much the same way. We were ahead in mana... I managed to shake the pet at one point and got a nice big drink in - but ended up getting into a bad position where I got scattered and ate a few mana burns. We came really close to a kill this time as well, but I overextended myself trying to DPS, and went OOM again.

Are we approaching this the wrong way? Should my rogue just sit on the priest to start?

Do you think I should I re-roll night elf to shake pets and drink? Currently Draenei, fwiw.

Thanks so much for doing this. I just recently switched to my priest - all of your posts are helping quite a bit.

I'm running with a subtlety rogue right now in 2s... tonight we ran into a priest / mm hunter team, and they beat us twice... but both games were really close.

Our strat was pretty simple. The first match: rogue stayed on hunter while I mana burned priest. The only trouble is, the hunter had a crocolisk that kept me almost permanently hamstrung, so I really couldn't "catch" his priest. (I don't have 4 set bonus yet.) The hunter was also scatter trapping, snake trapping, and frost trapping every pillar i tried to hump... it was really obnoxious.

The priest would stand on one side of arena, and hunter stayed in the middle. If I tried to cross the arena to get to the priest, the hunter punished me, so I had to wait for them to screw up to make the run.

Eventually, I got the priest completely stripped of mana and buffs, and my rogue went in for a kill, while I assisted with DPS. I feared the hunter to stop peels... but sadly, we didn't get the kill (ugh) and I went OOM in the process. After that, I was an easy kill for them, and we lost.

The second match with them went much the same way. We were ahead in mana... I managed to shake the pet at one point and got a nice big drink in - but ended up getting into a bad position where I got scattered and ate a few mana burns. We came really close to a kill this time as well, but I overextended myself trying to DPS, and went OOM again.

Are we approaching this the wrong way? Should my rogue just sit on the priest to start?

Do you think I should I re-roll night elf to shake pets and drink? Currently Draenei, fwiw.

Thanks for any insight.

Hey, no probs!

I can imagine this is a pretty frustrating comp to meet when they play like that and with priests the way they are you're probably not going to achieve a great deal by going on the opposing priest. But what will give you a massive advantage however, is if you guys get a kill on the pet - once you take this out of the equation you guys will then have a huge advantage.

There's a couple of ways you can go about killing the pet and those are:

1) Pillaring with your rogue committing totally to a pet kill
2) Off-Dotting the pet behind pillars and try to get it low then dance-switch to it with even maybe a smoke-bomb
3) Using your kill opportunities to go on the pet every-time (this includes double fears etc)

Using any of the three above or all three may seem drastic for a pet kill, but if you do take the pet out of the fight then that means you can play the obnoxious game back and go for spam drinks. They'll have no pet to keep you in combat and this will open up the possibilities to harm their positioning dramatically and be able to get solid fears off continuously with your rogue sitting on their hunter whole time.

The difficult thing when playing sub disc in 2s is you have no choice but to assist with DPS if you're going to land a kill, this hinders any mana advantage you have hugely when they survive so you have to be sure you have a plan to lean back on for when your nukes fail; in this case - it's a pet kill.

Another thing to consider when they're out of position and the hunter doesn't have his trinket is to go ahead and blind the hunter and dance-lock down the opposing priest with PI-Burns etc, small things like this can give you the edge over the mana wars.

Hey Craze
I'm playing healpally, disziplin & frostdk/warrior.
How should my gear look like?
I'm having 4/5 mooncloth and engineering glasses.
Which gems should I take and which enchants?
I've got jewelcrafting 500+, so which gems should I use there?
Thanks!!

Hey Craze, quick question about advanced kicks.
I can fake most kicks on the first fake, but there are times when I'm facing a really good kicker that really gets my mind ticking.
The most dangerous situation for me is when I'm low HP, and I still have the fake the kick, but hes holding back knowing I will fake. And this is when all instants are on CD (PW.S, PoM, Desperate prayer). What could I do in this kind of situation? Do you risk doing a long cast fake? Because if I get kicked I'm dead for sure. And they will definitely not kick early if they are reading my fakes really well.
Some tips with this would be greatly appreciated!

Do you risk doing a long cast fake? Because if I get kicked I'm dead for sure. And they will definitely not kick early if they are reading my fakes really well.
Some tips with this would be greatly appreciated!

How about mind control? Cast it all the way. You'll either complete the cast and make him eat an MC, or he'll interrupt you and you are free to heal....

Hey Craze
I'm playing healpally, disziplin & frostdk/warrior.
How should my gear look like?
I'm having 4/5 mooncloth and engineering glasses.
Which gems should I take and which enchants?
I've got jewelcrafting 500+, so which gems should I use there?
Thanks!!

As for using your jewel crafting, take the bigger stat gems for what stat you need the most (so it depends on your gear setup). As I said you'll be wanting a nice amount of regen, so if your spirit isn't up to par then take a 67+ spirit gem for example. (I think you can get those as JC at least haha).

But yeah, as two healer setups you'll be looking at plenty of mana regeneration with a healthy amount of resilience and intellect.

Hey Craze, quick question about advanced kicks.
I can fake most kicks on the first fake, but there are times when I'm facing a really good kicker that really gets my mind ticking.
The most dangerous situation for me is when I'm low HP, and I still have the fake the kick, but hes holding back knowing I will fake. And this is when all instants are on CD (PW.S, PoM, Desperate prayer). What could I do in this kind of situation? Do you risk doing a long cast fake? Because if I get kicked I'm dead for sure. And they will definitely not kick early if they are reading my fakes really well.
Some tips with this would be greatly appreciated!

Hey,

Usually you have to take risks. If I have some annoying rogue on me who will just not kick, then I'll just out-psych him and do a real cast then fake the following. If I'm feeling really confident, then I'll do two flashes in a row then fake my third - spam faking and not doing any real casts is as bad as getting kicked since it's so much down-time on your healing. He's probably locking you down a lot better via not kicking than he would if he did use kick.

Sometimes however, you really don't have time to fake and you KNOW he's going to kick you late into the cast.. At this time you shout at your teammates and spam holy nova until shield

Craze... can you tell me a little bit about using Inner Focus when talented into Strength of Soul?

Basically... what specific situations are you using inner focus? I feel like I might be using mine haphazardly, and I'd like to be more intelligent about when I use it.

Also, it seems I am still susceptible to pushback while casting under inner focus. Working as intended?

Yeah you will get push back unless you have a shield up.

I'm using inner-focus when I have to heal, it's a 45 sec cool-down so it's fairly difficult to waste. I myself play RMP, so there's small windows usually where you heal your teammates vs teams with a high amount of crowd control. Here I use my innerfocus for mana efficiency, safe in the knowledge that nobody can interrupt me and the extra crit chance.

It's of course great if you time it against counterspells, spell locks etc. Which atm is really easy to do since nobody is used to the new inner-focus, but saving a 45 second cooldown for the right time is a waste in terms of mana efficiency and making the most out of your spells. A free flash saves 5k mana, if it crits that potentially saves another 5k mana for example, if you're saving inner-focus for a long period of time, this means you're potentially 10-20k mana down than you would've been if you used it once/twice before (those aren't specific statistics though haha).

I'm pretty sure the first two comps are impossible against even marginally competent players... but vs. fury warrior / resto shaman I feel like the match could have gone either way. We lost when the rogue switched to the shaman and the warrior caved my skull in.